Motus Mentis

To get this site back up and running over the past couple of days, I created an account with a security company that does automated scanning and malware removal. After a day of work, the machinery had got the site cleaned up well enough for Bluehost to put it back online.

When I went back to my new security dashboard just now, however, I found an alarming message: a “defacement” had been detected somewhere in my WordPress database, and the security outfit was going to decertify the website as “clean” if I didn’t get it sorted out in 72 hours.

It turned out that what had happened was this: in reviewing the site, the scanner had run into this old post about the world-championship tournament between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen back in 2013.

The title of the post was “Pwned!”. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with this geeky word, have a look here.) It turned out that the scanner figured that this was the mark of a hacker’s having defaced the page! I explained to the security-company’s tech-support agent that this was actually the title of the post, and the scanner will “whitelist” it henceforward.

Unfortunately, though, it appears that the comment-form caching problem that we’ve been having still hasn’t been solved. I hope to get that taken care of soon. Thank you for you patience.